The rise of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty

María Noel Salgado

05/08/2013

Opinión

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Food sovereignty is being undermined by multilateral institutions and speculative capital. The increasing control of multinational corporations over agricultural policy has been made easy by the economic policies of multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the face of this, for more than a decade, social movements of small food producers have begun a process of coming together on every continent to defend Food Sovereignty in the face of capitalism that is constantly renewing and re-creating ways of condemning food to the role of a price tag, thus subjugating the peoples of the world. In this context and process of linkage, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) has emerged, as an international space to bring together these forces politically.

In our Latin America, organizations and social movements were pioneers in this process, in that the restitution of collective and sectoral rights for small food producers is a key condition, necessary to regain people's sovereignty.

The economic and financial crisis, but above all the ethical crisis resulted in a rise in food prices in 2006, increasing the poverty of millions of people in the South.

With a strategy driven by the large corporations, there was an abrupt explosion in the agrifood system at a world level, which enabled the corporations and governments to unleash a series of speculative measures that have tended to strengthen the control over food with instruments guaranteed by the systems of international governance, such as futures markets, private food banks, etc.

In the face of this situation, the World Forum of Nyeleni, in the year 2007, signified a point of inflection in the accumulation of continental and world forces. Our movements gained new strength, were revitalized and renewed their commitment to take on strategic actions, as well as further developing concepts, based on experiences of struggle and organization in territories, and widen the social and sector base of organizations that defend Food Sovereignty for the sovereignty of peoples.

These movements have broadened their campaigns and struggles against land grabbing, against the WTO, as the supreme organ of the mercantile agrifood chain that destroys farmers seed supplies; against the United Nations system that, deaf to the voice of peoples, continues, in complicity with transnational corporations, to enclose local agriculture, that is so rich in knowledge and resilient to the ravages of capitalism.

The movements are gaining strength, with actions and proposals for agrarian reform, for agroecology, for campesino seeds, for the collective rights of the nation and of campesinos, for free access to water, for the struggle for biodiversity.

We reinforce our actions in defence of our rights to access to information and to participate in decision-making processes. And these rights form the basis of good government, responsibility and equality in participation in economic, political and social life, free from any form of discrimination.

Small scale food producers should have the right to participate directly and actively in the formulation and implementation of agrifood policy at all levels. With this aim, we see as positive the changes that have begun to take place, since 2009, in the United Nations system; reforms across all their agencies, but especially those that are concerned with Food and Agriculture, the FAO, which in the spirit of opening up, in order to save their mandate (as demanded by peoples of the world), has opened its doors to civil society, in the framework of the reform of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). For the first time, social movements, with an organized and sustained voice, are reaching an assembly of the United Nations.

In this context, the movements articulated in the IPC began a period of analysis and reorganization of regional and world strategies to further their political and operative coordination.

In our continent, over two years, while this process has been carried out, we have learned to participate in an organized way in this new framework of the CFS and FAO. For Latin America this process reached a culminating point with the "3rd Special Conference for Food Sovereignty of Social Movements and Organizations of Civil Society" in preparation for the 32nd Regional Conference of FAO for Latin America and the Caribbean. There, we unanimously agreed to constitute a coordinating body to strengthen our proposals, actions and struggles: the Alliance for Food Sovereignty of the Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean was created. The news was presented during the Assembly to more than 150 delegates representing 30 regional and continental organizations.

On this occasion, organizations such as CLOC-VC, MAELA, COPROFAM, CITI, Friends of the Earth LAC, UITA, RAP-AL (1), encouraged and invited all the organizations present to sign up, and to join together to extend the struggle in the face of the relentless and unscrupulous advance of the prevailing system, saying: we are a political and social alliance of regional and subregional organizations, movements and networks of Latin America and the Caribbean, that represent campesinos, family farmers, indigenous peoples, fishermen, rural workers, agroecological campesinos, environmentalists, consumers, women, and youth, engaged in the struggle for food sovereignty.

This was a call to further develop joint actions and conceptual enhancement on the part of these organizations, coming out of their own histories of struggle and their interaction with people's sovereignty, in order to strengthen the reach of Food Sovereignty in the face of the oppressor model. Because of this, our actions are aimed at contributing to the unity and organization of peoples in the struggle for food sovereignty as a substantial element of building a new model of society with identity and good living (buen vivir). This also implies resistance to the prevailing development model that privatizes agrifood systems in favour of large corporations, imposing styles of consumption that bring with them malnutrition, hunger, poor distribution and the concentration of natural goods in the hands of the few in order to speculate with the hunger of the many and with the right to food, privatizing food itself.

Our joint action is based on the defence of the Human Right to Food, to feel ourselves in a territory with local identity, to have land to work by right, to defend nature's goods (seeds, water, land, biodiversity) as the heritage humankind, to provide healthy food for the people under our agrifood identities. We defend our right to mobilize as organizations that maintain our platforms in the free exercise of a democratic framework and in resistance to any project that affects us, including the struggle against the criminalization and repression of social and popular mobilization. We aspire to take part, in a direct way, in public policy concerning food and agriculture, to defend the land so that our youth do not have to move to the cities, to revalue the rural culture of peoples and their food history, to interconnect actions with consumer organizations and to initiate struggles in urban areas.

The central lines of our action are urgent: we need and we are moving toward an Integral Agrarian Reform, for the transformation of the agrifood model of monoculture and monoconsumption into one framed by agroecology, integrating diverse indigenous and campesino agricultures under the principles of biodiversity, territorial organization, productive frameworks for healthy and sovereign food, systems of recovery and restitution of seeds, systems of water regeneration, along with the claim of joint political action to defend our interests and the reorganization of trade in food based on local processes and solidarity.

Our first Assembly will take place in August 2013 in Bogotá, Colombia, where the general policy lines will be defined, to give direction to policy questions that will direct the articulation, as well as the alliances, the spaces of international representation, and the main actions to strengthen the coordinated struggle for Food Sovereignty in the continent. We find ourselves with renewed strength, with the leadership of comrades who have taken on with force and determination the challenge that faces us, and that gives us the fortitude and courage to seek change together with popular forces.

From within the Alliance we understand that Food Sovereignty is not only an alternative to the capitalist model, but the fundamental pillar for the survival of society.

- María Noel Salgado is a delegate with the Movimiento Agroecológico de América Latina y el Caribe -- MAELA -- in the Coordinating Committee of the Alliance.

(Translation for Alai by Jordan Bishop)

(Article published in Spanish in the July edition (487) of ALAI's magazine América Latina en Movimiento, titled: "La alternativa agroecológica" (The Agroecological Alternative). http://alainet.org/publica/487.phtml

Note:

(1) Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo -CLOC Vía Campesina-; Movimiento Agroecológico de América Latina y el Caribe -MAELA-, Confederación de Productores Familiares -COPROFAM-, Consejo Internacional de Tratados Indios -CITI-, Amigos de la Tierra (Friends of the Earth) /Latinoamérica y Caribe, Unión Internacional de Trabajadores de la Alimentación -UITA- and Red de Acción contra Plaguicidas América Latina y Caribe -RAP-AL-.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/78229